‘“If you really want to get wages to grow broadly for everybody it means confronting power in the workplace,” said Mishel. “Confronting the fact that we have an economy geared toward creating huge corporate profits and rising stock prices, but not rising wages, and an economy constructed to give some people power and other people less power.’

Mishel also takes issue with the common assertion by President Obama and others that education is a big part of the solution to the wage problem.

‘Whatever President Obama wants to do in schools or getting more people to go to college is not going to change the fact that wages for college graduates have stagnated for ten years,” said Mishel. “More than 25 percent of college graduates are in managerial or business occupations, and they haven’t had a wage increase in ten years. How can anyone think the answer to the wage problem is going to college?’”